


Little Vamp Tale, A

by thebasement_archivist



Category: The X-Files
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 1998-07-31
Updated: 1998-07-31
Packaged: 2018-11-20 04:47:54
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,020
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11328915
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thebasement_archivist/pseuds/thebasement_archivist
Summary: What kind of vampire would Mulder be? Mulder/Scully friendship.





	Little Vamp Tale, A

**Author's Note:**

> Note from alice ttlg, the archivist: this story was originally archived at [The Basement](http://fanlore.org/wiki/The_Basement), which moved to the AO3 to ensure the stories are always available and so that authors may have complete control of their own works. To preserve the archive, I began manually importing its works to the AO3 as an Open Doors-approved project in June 2017. I e-mailed all creators about the move and posted announcements, but may not have reached everyone. If you are (or know) this creator, please contact me using the e-mail address on [The Basement's collection profile](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/thebasement/profile).

 

A Little Vamp Tale by A. Leigh-Anne Childe

Author's Note: This is a little bit of fluff that caught in my brain, which seemed appropriate to post for Halloween. I wrote this after an email exchange with torch on the question of "What kind of vampire would Mulder be?" <g> And that, essentially, is all this story is -- a brief, whimsical, but darkish exercise on the theme. I don't know if I'll write more than this. I'd be thrilled if anyone wanted to pick up the ball and run with it, and write their own stories about Vamp!Mulder.   
Disclaimer: Mulder isn't mine, damn it. Nor is Scully. Just toying with them again. Archive wherever you like, as long as you don't change anything, including my name.  
Rating: NC-17, Mulder/Other slash, AU  


* * *

A Little Vamp Tale  
by A. Leigh-Anne Childe

***

"What now?"

"Frankly, Mulder, I have no idea. My medical texts don't cover this. I wish I could link your condition to some form of porphyria, or some other similar condition, but frankly. . .I can't."

Mulder slumped forward in his chair, gloomily resting his face in his hands for a moment. "God, Scully. . .of all the things I thought might happen to me, this is *not* what I expected."

Scully moved to the chair across from him and sat down. Composing herself carefully, she tried to find words for her conflicting turbulent thoughts. The words didn't come easily; this wasn't some X-File. This was Mulder. His life, his. . .death? "Mulder, whatever's wrong with you, you're not a vampire. You're not dead."

Mulder looked up, his pale shadowed face glowing with an eerie inner luminescence in the raw light of the examination room. "But am I alive?" he said with a slight, grim twist of his lips. "They aren't dead, are they. They're the undead. . .guess I should say we'."

"Mulder," Scully said firmly. "This--this virus, or whatever you've got--that's a disease, yes, and there may be others suffering from it. But they're not vampires. You're not a vampire." She studied him, but the repetition didn't seem to be sinking in.

"This didn't just happen, Scully," Mulder said after a few moments. He flashed his grey-green eyes at her, and for a second they appeared to Scully like two jaded pennies, cool and dull. "Someone did this to me."

Scully's heart jerked like a small, snared fish in her chest and she had to pause to catch her breath. "How do you know?"

"I was there."

"Mulder, did you *let* someone do this to you?" Scully wasn't sure what made her jump to that conclusion. Somehow Mulder, just being Mulder, invited the speculation of masochism.

"Well, I wasn't really up to protest at the time. . .um, it was, you know." He ended this as if it were an actual sentence, then added several beats later, "One of those things."

"One of what things?"

Mulder cleared his throat. "Birds and the bees, Scully--or the birds and the bats. Vampire bats."

"What," Scully said skeptically. "Somebody bit you during sex, and now you think they--" She hesitated thoughtfully. "Well, I suppose the disease, whatever it is, could have been transmitted via a bite."

"I'd say so. He was--" Mulder broke off with what might have been a blush, eyes glinting her way again, then his gaze sliding off with faint embarrassment.

"Mulder, you know I don't care about your sexual preferences. . .or practices." Scully drew herself up a bit, unconsciously rearranging her hands on her trousers. "I assume you had safe sex," she said. 

"I--I think so."

Scully looked at him with disbelieving eyes, a look scalpel-like and cutting.

"I was a bit out of it."

"Mulder." Scully bit off the single word, laden with a hundred shades of feeling and expression, but balked at more. 

Mulder shifted in his chair uncomfortably. "I wasn't that drunk. I didn't think I was."

"Drugs?"

"I don't know. I just. . .I don't know. I was drinking beer from the bottle. It would have been hard for him to spike it, but I guess he could have found a way." 

"Did you go back to your place or his?"

"Mine." Mulder stood abruptly and went to examine himself in the small mirror above the sink. "I can see myself," he said in a low monotone.

"Of course you can, Mulder," Scully said with quiet patience. 

"Do I look a little fuzzy around the edges to you, Scully," Mulder asked absently.

"More than usual?" Scully returned dryly. 

Mulder raised a hand to his cheek and stroked the light stubble there gently. "I wonder if this will grow any more."

Scully looked down at her clasped hands, assuming an internal armor of tolerance. After a moment, she looked up and stared across the distance to where Mulder was standing. He'd arrived at her doorstep, panicky, glassy-eyed, wearing the same worn sweats and sweater he was wearing now. He looked tired, yes; hung-over, yes; but vampiric? Well, from the back, certainly not. But Scully had to admit that Mulder's pale face currently bore a disturbingly otherworldly aura. 

"Mulder, we have to run some more tests. I know you don't want to check yourself into a hospital, but--"

"Scully." Mulder turned. "I can't eat, my vital signs are so low you can't even get a regular signal on your monitors, sunlight suddenly hurts, and I have an incredible desire to bite your neck that has nothing to do with your feminine charms. What does this tell you?"

"That some unusual retrovirus has invaded your system and that you're working yourself up into a delusion of vampirism," Scully said firmly, without emphasis or emotion. "We need to find out what form the virus is taking, and why your immune system has succumbed to it. It's likely to have entered your cellular network as some sort of bacteriophage." She grew absorbed in her train of thought, then looked up and directed a clear look at Mulder. "We're going to need to find this man you slept with. If he's out there infecting others--"

"Scully," Mulder interrupted. When she stared back waiting for him to finish, he felt the words drain out of him. How could he get through to her? How could he explain that he was looking at her, and she suddenly looked. ..mortal. It was a distinction he'd never have imagined himself making, and it terrified him. "Scully, we're not going to find him. He's gone. He doesn't want to be found." 

"That's defeatist, Mulder."

Mulder leaned back on the sink. "There's something I've never talked to you about. Not in any depth. When you were--gone--I had a case in Los Angeles. A trio killing. Do you remember?"

"I remember you mentioning it. I believe the words used were fucked up big.'" 

A shadow of a smiled edged at Mulder's lips. He loved hearing Scully say fuck'. She always said it casually, but it never failed to fascinate him, like watching someone eat their hot dog with a knife and fork. 

"Yes. I fucked up. Without you there to play skeptic to my believer, I had to wear both faces. It didn't work out too well. And I. . ." He thought of all the things he could tell her of that time. His psyche-bruising insomnia. His need. How after her abduction he'd spent weeks walking around with his soul flayed raw, with his wounds open and bleeding for all to see, and how when he could no longer exist as a mass of raw nerve endings he'd collapsed down inward, let the surface thicken, let the zombie body drive itself. That period was a melange of dark impressions in his mind now--Cole and Krycek and Kristen, sleeplessness and blood and a loneliness so utter that after a time it lost even its bracing chill, ashing out into a stale dead air. It seemed extraordinary that he'd continued breathing, so anaerobic was that lifeless medium.

"What?"

Mulder blinked. "I disbelieved where I should have believed."

He'd been intending to say something else, Scully sensed, but she let it go. "I read your case report," she said. "The suspects shared a collective delusion of vampirism, of a warped religious nature, if I remember correctly."

"Not if you read *my* case report," Mulder said dryly. "It wasn't a delusion. I don't know if they were vampires, but they drank more pints of blood in a day than the average American does milk--and I saw the physical condition of one of those suspects. A preliminary examination suggested porphyria; he was burned to death by exposure to sunlight; he was pronounced dead and then he came back to life within forty-eight hours--with no visible signs of his wounds. Does this sound familiar?"

"It sounds like every bad vampire movie I've ever seen. What's your point?"

"You can call this a disease if you want, Scully--but I'm not the first person who's caught it. It may be a different strain, but its progressive effect is likely to be very similar."

"Which is why we have to find this man--"

Mulder made a small exasperated sound and thumped the heel of his hand once against the cold metal of the sink. "Want to see something, Scully?"

Warily, Scully raised a brow.

Closing his eyes, Mulder lapsed immediately into a trance-like state that far outstripped any previous zoned behavior he'd exhibited in the course of Scully's acquaintance with him. She watched him for a minute, waiting, her medical anxiety over his condition blending with increasing trepidation for she knew not what. Then he opened his eyes and fixed a look on her that made her heart stutter stupidly in her chest. Immobilized, she felt herself suddenly birdlike, as if Mulder were a cat who'd drawn a bead on her. As she continued to watch, he moved gracefully toward her, then knelt in front of her chair. Their eyes locked, fused in a single loop of frozen sight. But when Mulder opened his mouth, Scully's paralysis broke and she shrieked once--just for a second, before swallowing the sound, which collapsed into equal parts choke and squeak.

"Oh my god!"

"Pretty cool, huh?"

Stunned, trying hard not to show the tremble beneath her skin, Scully cupped Mulder's jaw. He obligingly allowed his brief grin to melt back into a cheerful gape. Through his parted lips, she studied the fangs. These were not the results of receding gums. They hadn't been their five minutes ago. Unable to keep her gaze from skittering up to his, and told herself that the weird glow in his eyes was merely a trick of the fluorescent light. 

"I vant to bite your neckkkkkk," Mulder said in a terrible approximation of a Romanian accent. 

"Mulder. Cut it out." Scully wondered if her voice sounded as thin as it felt, wondered if Mulder could read how unnerved she was. 

Smiling oddly, Mulder said: "Watch this." 

And then, in defiance of everything Scully knew about her partner's state of physical fitness, Mulder flowed backwards, back flipping and landing on his hands before pushing himself upright again, for all the world like a springing slinky. 

"What do you think--will I pass my annual physical certification for duty? Nah, you're probably right. Got to have a heartbeat. Stickler for regulations, you doctors."

"Mulder, you. . ." You have a heartbeat, she tried to say, but failed. Because he didn't. At least nothing so regular that it could be categorized as such. "You have a heartbeat," she finally did say. *More or less.* Trying for her best professional detachment, she went on. "And please don't do that again. You're suffering a form of bradycardia, an abnormally slowed heart rate, and you could easily pass out. That you're conscious and mobile-- very mobile--is a miracle, in fact. Normally with a heart rate this low, under forty beats a minute, you'd be in a coma. But you're not. You're blood pressure is down, but you say you're not feeling any vertigo or shortness of breath, and I can't pinpoint any origin for your condition on your EKG."

"Doesn't it gall you at all, Scully, to see someone defy the basic principles of the human biological system? I mean, don't you get even a little bit pissed at revivified zombies and fat-sucking psychopaths. . .at me?"

"Your condition disturbs me, of course."

Mulder nearly shook his head. "You're amazing, Scully," he said, smiling with what seemed to be genuine fondness rather than any sneaky mockery. 

One of Scully's brows twitched of its own accord. "I suppose it's a measure of how much I've seen since joining your investigations that I didn't call an ambulance for you an hour ago."

"What would you tell them? Thirty-something white male, ambulatory, conscious, and lucid--has no regular pulse but does a mean samba."

Scully tilted her head and gave him a narrow-eyed look. "I would, for lack of a better explanation, have to conclude--to theorize--that somehow your nervous system has been stimulated to heighten acetylcholine production. This might help to explain your unusual dexterity. Acetylcholine is a neurotransmitter. It's probably flooding your striated muscle tissues, both voluntary and involuntary. I'd say that some kind of directed recruitment was taking place--an adjustment of the number of motor units active at a given time in your muscles. Right now they seem to be more excitable than normal."

"I dunno. I'm pretty excitable, normally. Besides, teeth aren't muscles--are they?" Mulder gave her another ghoulish grin.

"No, Mulder, they're not," Scully admitted. She could hear the rich sticky reluctance in her voice, the same tone that filled her throat and mouth whenever she was faced with the incredible. Teeth aren't muscles, but a heart held plenty. It made no sense whatsoever. She sighed to herself. "I don't know how to explain your fangs." She gave him an almost irritated look, focusing on the single issue raised and momentarily brushing away all the other questions that were thronging her besieged brain like crazed flies. 

"Do you think vampires really can fly? I don't want to jump off a building and find out the answer's no, but--"

"Jumping off anything would be a bad idea." Scully stood and moved with growing restlessness to the examining table. She straightened the paper strip that draped its length, then smoothed it once with her hand. She thought she knew what Mulder's mind was doing. She'd seen it before, Mulder flirting with a theory, trying it on for size. But this was personal and different; there was something newly unpleasant about his readiness to embrace this delusion of darkness.

"I'm beginning to think," she said, turning to face Mulder, "that you don't want treatment for this."

"I don't," Mulder said without thinking. Under her cool stony gaze, he realized the import of his words and grew a shade sheepish. "Okay, I was a bit disturbed at first, but I'm getting used to the idea. It's growing on me." 

"Like a fungus?"

Mulder gave his new, odd smile again. "Like a shadow."

It was trite to shiver, but nonetheless a cold flash of dismay shunted down Scully's body from scalp to toe. 

"I want to run some more toxicological tests on your blood. You're behaving out of character and I'm not even sure you realize it."

"But I do," Mulder said. He stepped closer like an actor taking a mark, gaze holding hers. "I feel the difference."

Scully swallowed; she felt she was holding her ground against an advance and it disturbed her. It was wrong. For a brief flash of insight she almost recognized the edge of something just beyond her normal ken, a force new and impersonally terrible; she sensed it in the manner of a horse sensing a nearing wall of flame, but then pushed herself past that intuition. 

"What now?" she said to him, repeating back his earlier words without hearing their echo.

"It's getting late. . .early. I need to sleep." Mulder turned as if to find a window, but there were none in the small clinical room. Uneasily, he checked his watch. "It's four-thirty. . .when's dawn?"

Scully suppressed a snappish, knee-jerk attack on his delusion, and merely said, "About six-twenty, six-thirty. You've got plenty of time to fly back home if you light out now." 

Mulder's eyes were amused on the flickering surface, but somehow chilled from the depths. "Sarcasm doesn't become you. You saw that burn."

Feeling herself relent as she always did, Scully said, "Yes. I know. I'm sorry. You shouldn't be out in the sunlight in your condition." *But.* *But you're not a vampire, Mulder, and I want to kick you.* 

"It's healed," Mulder said.

"What?"

Mulder peeled off the bandage with one casual stroke. "The burn. It's gone. Healed."

Staring at his bare smooth skin, Scully found no words. 

"Interesting disease. Did you say something about my immune system? Not too shabby, from the looks of it."

Temporarily defeated of rebuttal, Scully nodded once. He was obviously not going to agree to monitored care, and despite a wealth of contradictory evidence, seemed stable enough, but she still had to try.

"We need to check you into the nearest hospital--"

"No," Mulder said flatly, so flatly Scully flinched before she could stop herself. He was adamant by nature, not to mention blunt, but never before had he slammed a door in her face in quite such forceful fashion. 

She hesitated carefully. It aggrieved her professional principles sorely to let him walk away in this condition, but this was a well-known itch of conscience that she was used to resisting. Always, with his most casual breath, Mulder forced her to her limits. She looked at his familiar, stubborn face, now set into lines that suggested the crystalline inviolability of raw diamond. 

"I want you to come home with me," Scully said quietly. It surprised a still, watchful part of her mind to realize that she was afraid to press him on the issue of hospitalization. "You shouldn't be alone and I can have my mother come in when I leave for work. If you lapse into a coma while you're sleeping--"

"No," Mulder said again. "I don't want anyone watching me sleep. I'll be fine."

After a moment, Scully, rather than answering directly, moved to a counter and fished through several metal drawers, then turned to him when she'd found what she sought. "I want you to wear this. It's a modified event monitor that I can program to transmit directly to my cell phone. I'll be able to keep tabs on any changes in your heart rate. If it drops further or becomes irregular I'll know immediately."

Mulder gave a small, intense wince as he took the device from her. 

"Just wrap the band around your arm and thread the wires through your shirt; the transducer adheres to your chest."

Mulder stood immobile with an irksome show of patience and allowed Scully to hook him up and run a transmitter test, then drew his shirt back on wordlessly.

Scully began to say something vaguely reassuring, she knew not what, then looked at his face and said instead, "Go home, Mulder. Get some sleep. I'll have the lab run further tests tomorrow and I'll stop by after work."

"After dusk."

Scully picked up her purse and returned her cell phone to its depths, refusing to be provoked by his morbidly cheerful tone. "Sure. Fine. Whatever."

"Pick me a pint of B-positive on your way, will you?"

At this Scully gave him a cold, monitory look. "If you can't keep down food, Mulder, I'll commit you to a hospital myself." 

"I'm not hungry. . .not yet. You might have to bring me blood, Scully. Unless you want me to start feeding off the neighbors. They've never struck me as a healthy bunch, so it's not an option I'm considering with enthusiasm."

Scully moved out into the hallway, ignoring him again, pulling on her coat. She felt rather than saw him fall into step next to her.

"I'll need a supplier, Scully, if I want to avoid the ethical pitfalls of my curse."

Scully ground her teeth together in brute silence. 

"Doomed to walk the earth eternally, forced to feed my unholy hunger, yadda yadda. I've never found that gothic, graveyard aesthetic seductive, you know. Candles, blood, darkness. I've visited the periphery of that world. It's not me. Still, in a few thousand years, who knows?"

"Good night, Mulder."

"Sweet dreams, Scully."

The small hairs of Scully's nape stood on end as she felt soft lips brush below one ear. She stifled a gasp, twisted away, attempting to make the move a casual side step rather than a retreat. 

"Don't get spooky, Mulder."

"Sorry." Mulder stood watching after her as she walked to her car. "Drive safe," he called out after her. He rarely tossed off such protective pleasantries, but some instinct tickled his spine like a cruelly playful finger. It worried him to watch her drive off into the night, as if into a vast dark ocean that was just becoming known to him, and was less reassuring for being less strange. He could hear a million whispers in the night; sounds fluttered at his eardrums, mothlike and too near. Sound of the grass whispering, of the moths themselves in flight. Sounds of distant engines and riding heartbeats. 

Mulder swallowed, and heard his own body grind like a machine. Was he alive? He took a step and then stilled, mesmerized with sensation. *This is new,* whispered the thready birthing thing that was his consciousness. *Oh, this. . .yes, this is. . .new.*

It was so new that it had barely made its impact on him felt. He hadn't allowed himself to fully take in what was happening. He couldn't allow it now. Deliberately he shut out the seduction of the night and got in his car for the drive home. The streets of Quantico were empty and quiet and were left behind swiftly as he headed for the interstate that would carry him to Alexandria. 

All during the drive home he thought about what little contact he'd had with vampires before now. The Trinity murder case had been an oddity even to his mind, even by X-Files standards--or maybe it just carried a lingering strangeness because it was one of the few cases he'd worked that Scully hadn't vetted for him with her methodical skepticism. It lacked definition; remained unresolved in a way that other, more superficially amorphous cases didn't. He had felt, in the days after Kristen's death, that he'd brushed up against the border of something larger than the case itself--it had been a vague, blurred shape, or perhaps feeling, an area of deeper darkness within the usual dark, like a void or fog that blocked out the stars of the sky. 

The feeling had settled into the sedimentary depths of his mind, to be gradually blanketed with other layers of feeling and thought, to lie there more or less undisturbed, sealed away. Now the surging change in him was stirring that layer of experience, bringing a sift of images to the surface that carried the swampish, unpleasant reek of decomposition. Needles. A bloodied face, turned his way with the rage of interrupted feeding. Burnt flesh. Lust. 

The memory of his physical lust was almost the most distasteful, because what he'd taken had been not just improper but expedient, because had hadn't even been attracted to the woman. He had never used anyone else quite so unfeelingly; even now the linked drama of sex and death seemed astonishingly flaccid. He'd grieved not one moment for Kristen Kilar. In life, she'd barely impinged on his awareness. At that time, during the darkest period of Scully's absence, he had been a remote observer of himself and of the drama playing out on that distant screen, the world. Detached, pitiless, some crucial part of him had never really acknowledged Kristen. Sometimes in fragments of dreams since, he dreamed himself immobile, sitting in a chair in the empty chamber of his mind's eye, and she flitted by, the palest rag of a ghost. That was, too, how she'd been in life. Emptied, body without spirit. 

But even Kristen had carried that faint dark aura of otherness, tincture and resonance of a darker, more elusive mystery. Mulder had to wonder now if what he'd seen--the pathetic vampiric theatre of the Trinity killers' imaginations--might have been the faint imitation of something larger, something invisible to Mulder's own then-mortal eye. The club Tepes--had it been merely a seedy, all-too-human construct, a place where scruffy neogoths could pursue a jaded dream of supernatural glamour? Or had there been something beyond the club's obvious and stylized facade? He wondered if it was still there, wondered if he could return. And if he wanted to. 

Pilgrimage?

He entertained the idea idly, but it seemed a long shot and he couldn't justify it to himself just yet. *Scully's right about one thing. I've got to try and find him. What was his name. . .God, I wasn't that fucked up, was I? . . . Stefan? Could it have been that cheesy? Not Steven. This was not a guy you'd ever call Steve and invite over for beer and cheese puffs and football. Stephan?* 

Stephan. Mulder chewed on the name, worrying at it, knowing it helped him not at all. He could return to the bar he'd been in, hope that his companion had been there before, that the bartender had some whiff of this particular patron's life beyond the club's walls. Faint hopes. But he had to have something to hold onto. He could not be alone in this. They didn't do that, did they? Change a man and then abandon him to his alteration, to make the long dark journey of immortality in solitude? It seemed. . .unlikely. 

Assaulted by doubts, he thought of Scully again, her sensible pursuit of exactitude and rational answers. Was she right about this too? Maybe he was crazy, or working himself down that route. Vampire. If he had been made a vampire, would it be like this? Trying to scoff at himself with an interior, Scully-like voice, Mulder tossed up the skeet one by one and shot them down. 

I'm turning into a vampire. (Vampires are myth; I have a disease.) My heart has stopped beating. (No it hasn't, or I'd be dead.) I can't abide sunlight; I can do flips like a preadolescent gymnast; my wounds heal with unholy speed. . .I am craving blood. (Illness and imagination; hysteria and delusion.) Want to see my fangs, mom? (Back, Satan spawn.)

Mulder sighed and his hands played restlessly across the steering wheel. Outside, trees slid away on either side of the highway, a thick dark weave with the night. The car's wheels swished rhythmically on the road's cool surface. More quelling than all the rational arguments he could muster was the dry, small feeling of ironic absurdity that clung to his consciousness like a scrap of autumn leaf and resisted the pull of the wind. Fox Mulder, Special Agent and vampire at large. 

No, Scully was right. He was straining the leash of reason on this one. And besides, if he were morphing into some supernatural creature of the night, surely it would be more dramatic than this--more extreme, more blatant. *I'd be freaking out about now, if this were really happening. Blood, the wine of violence, the promise of e'er wing'ed night--? Ah, angst of my heart, where are you. No. I'm too calm, too blase. . .maybe I'm dreaming?* 

"You're not dreaming, my light-fingered Fox."

Mulder's grip jerked on the steering wheel and he veered half off the road before an arm reached over the seat-back and steadied the vehicle out. Instinctively his gaze jumped to the rearview mirror and found there the reflection of a familiar, faintly smiling face.

"I can see you in the mirror," he said without thinking.

"Yes. How useful folklore is. If you can see my image, I couldn't possibly be a vampire, could I?" 

Mulder continued to glance between the mirror and the road. "You read my mind just now." 

"You're on my wavelength," the other said dryly. 

"Not many people tell me that."

"Well, this won't change much, I'm afraid."

"Why not?" 

"Attunement rarely lasts--not so strongly, anyway. How many times I've wished I could read the thoughts of my children. But it's a passing affinity of blood."

"Children?"

"Don't be dense."

"This isn't my usual area."

"I am aware. That's why I chose you, your gaze isn't bound to the earth. You watch the skies." With an almost facetious flourish, Mulder's passenger tapped the side of his nose, a gesture laden with ironic and complicit acknowledgment. "You'll be useful."

Mulder's body tensed imperceptibly. "That's it--that's the reason? My work?" He wanted to laugh, but the sound caught and rattled in his throat. "You've got to be joking." He tacked the last few words on morosely, like a small, irritable kick. 

"Well, your obsessions and pursuits might change. But the knowledge will remain, and your perception--your point of view, so to speak. Different."

"Useful. . .to whom?"

"In the abstract, Fox," the other said, his voice mild.

"Is your name really Stephan?"

"Yes."

Mulder nodded, as if to himself. "So what's the deal, Stephan? Are you going to here to give me the lowdown--to induct me into the legion of fiends? Tutor me in rituals and vampiric law, set me up with a savvy 401K plan, teach me how to dress. . .I knew it wasn't one of those bite-and-run deals."

"But you feared it might be," Stephan said, leaning forward and resting his chin nearly on Mulder's shoulder. He teased Mulder's ear with his lips, then flicked his tongue out suddenly, divining its whorled cup. "You thought I'd abandoned you to your fate. Immortality and solitude."

Mulder swallowed. "I'm finding this hard to take in," he said, and heard his voice rasp with a rough blend of uncertainty and a sudden, stabbing hunger. 

"Are you thirsting yet?" Stephan whispered in his ear, seeming to reach directly into his mind again to limn the precise measure of his need.

"God, yes," Mulder breathed harshly. He hurt with it, as if struck with a knife. He hadn't even known how desperate he was until the words grated from his mouth.

"You're beginning to weave," Stephan observed politely.

It took a moment for the words to sink in, then Mulder cursed and pulled to the side of the road with a light screech of tires. His muscles worked with sharp, jerking movements as he braked the car--and then he was twisting viciously from his seat belt, carving his body around the car seat, seeking the other man instinctively. With perfectly applied strength, Stephan caught Mulder and held him in place, stretched halfway across the seat, a bow of straining flesh. Mulder swore again, and felt his spine bend further as the other man manipulated him. He'd begun upright, directing his own body toward its goal like an arrow, but now he'd been turned; his waist was slung over the seatback and his head hung backward into a void, cupped and held only by one of Stephan's steady hands.

The first striking bite shocked him but before thought could even form he was grabbing the back of Stephan's own neck, fastening the other man's mouth in place, hoarsely voicing his pleasure. Quickly light-headed, he would have given himself and his blood up without a word of protest until he was drained. This was not the parodic play of needle or blade, the debauched grotesquerie of blood sports that had never held any appeal for Mulder; this pleasure, oddly enough, did not carry the bitter taste of death. He had seen the work of serial killers, both crude and innovative in their mutilations, and had never thought blood anything other than a fluid accessory of life, or the detritus of its husk, splattered, coagulated, the residue of something gutted and bereft. No eroticism had ever attached itself to the substance. 

Until now. Snagged in the teeth of a creature wild and inhuman, like a gazelle entrapped in the jaws of a lion, he realized even as he sank into a flickering, star-sparked darkness that he was hard and struggling frantically--for release, not escape. When Stephan's hand slid between his legs to grip him, half-steadying, half-teasing, Mulder felt that touch complete a circuit of desire in his body and came with an immediacy that stunned him, after which he just as abruptly blacked out. 

Stephan drew his mouth away from Mulder's neck and pulled him fully into the back seat with a sinuous display of grace and strength that went safely unseen by human eyes. He settled back into a corner and held the other man against him, breathing in his particular confluent scent, a mix which blended the rich, aphrodisiacal cologne of musk and blood with lighter, more artificial scents--soap, shampoo, the crisp impersonal odor of an adhesive bandage--these and others, transfers from unknown sources; a woman's perfume; crushed grass; the transient metallic traces of surfaces touched.

Mulder's hair spilled against his mouth and Stephan brushed his lips there, leaving blood on its threads, then lowered his mouth to the other's. After a kiss, he said, "You taste of the oil of sunflower seeds."

Mulder made a tiny, fuzzy sound. 

"Drink from me," Stephan urged, raising his wrist to Mulder's lips. Their lush gates opened and Mulder's mouth attached to him with the instinctive urgency of a suckling child, and his teeth drove hard into Stephan's wrist, breaking the skin and sinking deep. "Ah, Christ," Stephan muttered, feeling himself come erect, a trapped thrusting hardness that nudged Mulder's hip, a pulsing counterpoint to the pleasure sliding through his veins. He ground his own teeth together and rode out the force of the other man's need, his ruthless, rhythmic sucking, until he knew it was time to break free. 

"Enough," he said finally, pulling his wrist away, noting with old, knowing eyes the tropic movement of Mulder's head as it turned and tracked his withdrawal. "You've had enough," he repeated, to assure the other now. 

"Doesn't feel like enough," Mulder muttered thickly, rubbing his head back against Stephan's shoulder. Blood, salty and pure and indecently silky upon his tongue, diffused through his body, pulling him down in its tendrils toward a languorous, opiated surrender.

"I know."

Mulder shifted and leaned back against Stephan, eyelids lowering heavily; the vampire's body enclosed him, a semi-draped blanket of heat across back and thighs. He could feel Stephan's unalleviated arousal, a brand wedged stiffly against the side of his ass. Their arms slid into synch and locked together at the hands. Sated, sleepy, Mulder almost forgot where he was. "I still think I'm dreaming," he murmured.

"Mm. Why?" Stephan smiled into Mulder's hair, a curve of lips both sardonical and indulgent.

"Why?" Mulder sighed. "You can't be so far gone. . ." That you don't know why, he finished to himself, wondering if Stephan heard the words regardless, suspecting he had. He slid down onto the seat, laying his head across Stephan's lap, and looked up at him from under the pleasure-weighted lids of his eyes. "You should be cold, rotting. Taste of the grave."

"You've mistaken me for someone dead."

"Aren't we?"

"Of course not."

"Why did I think vampires don't have sex?" Mulder nudged the hardness between Stephan's legs with his cheek.

"It's that Anne Rice woman," Stephan pronounced dryly. "Advocacy and accuracy don't always go hand in hand, particularly in fiction."

"Do you know her?" Mulder asked, amused and caught by the notion. 

"Good lord, no. The woman's equivalent to a giant bug light--death to our kind. The government has had her under constant covert surveillance for the better part of a decade now. If you want to wake up tied to some dissection table in a lab half a mile under, by all means, get in touch."

"Does that happen?"

"It happened a few times that I know of. Weak-witted vampires, like lame rabbits, are rare."

Mulder's eyes glinted greenly up at Stephan, embered and distinct even in the car's dim interior. "I bet. How--"

"No quizzes now," Stephan interrupted, looking out the car window. "It's getting light. I shall sleep over with you, I think."

Mulder struggled into a sitting position and blinked at the greyed, paling sky. He didn't bother to question Stephan's casually assumptive announcement. "Hey--by the way--" Twisting, he glanced brightly back at the other. "Couldn't we just fly?"

Stephan raised a brow. "I don't think we're near an airport, my dear Mulder."

"Um, bats?"

Rolling his eyes, Stephan curled back into his corner, lounging like the icon of all things gothic and bored, but resembling to Mulder's eyes one of the more well-bred and buttered members of the English aristocracy, an epicene crumb from its upper crust, rather like a vampirish Peter Wimsey, lacking only a monocle to complete the make-up of his bland, affable face. 

"No flying?" Mulder said, rather disappointed.

"Please--you didn't seriously think--" Stephan shook his head and sighed. "You really are quite credulous, my boy. I do hope a few hundred years will season you."

Mulder pulled a face and got out of the car, returning to the driver's seat a few moments later, then starting up and driving off. "So. . .how old are you?" he asked after negotiating back into the thin flow of pre-dawn traffic.

"Two hundred and--" Pause. "Fifteen, I believe."

Mulder calculated. "Right around the time of our nation's independence."

"You'll pardon me if I resist the affiliation."

"You're British."

"No. Not these days. But I spent my first thirty years riding the whirlwind your upstart colonials sowed. A more unwashed, rapacious, and self-serving lot of convicts the world has never seen, I promise you."

"I believe you."

Stephan smiled suddenly. "There were giants among them, though. And you carry within you the shades of your ancestors--you have that same driven mien and rough, quixotic charm as so many young men I met when visiting the new world for the first time. Idealistic one moment, cynical the next--suspicious of eye and soft of cheek." Stephan winked wickedly as Mulder's gaze met his in the rear-view mirror.

Mulder nearly blushed. Oh get a grip, he told himself. As one part of his mind busied itself itemizing the myths so far debunked--nonreflective mirrors, bat-flight, death--and wondered what the hell he was going to tell his mother, another part, somewhere in the murkier depths of the limbic region, was flaring and brimming with a mix of primitive lusts. 

Once inside the Alexandria city limits he drove swiftly to his apartment building. Streaks of pink light had broken across the sky by now, and sunlight had begun to butter the rooftops and glint off reflective surfaces. Both driver's side doors opened simultaneously once they stopped, and Stephan flowed from the back of the car in step with Mulder, then neatly kicked the door shut behind him with the black rubber sole of one elegantly-shaped shoe. 

Glancing up at the pastel-stricken sky he wrinkled his nose faintly, but looked for a transient moment almost wistful. "Trite, I know," he said to Mulder, catching his inquiring eye. "But one does come to miss the sunlight. I tend to linger at the edges, push the envelope--many of us do. For some it's a kind of brinkmanship, a game of chicken; for others a hunger to be fed, almost as strong as for blood. It's close akin to dabbling at the fire with one's fingers, leaning in to study the tapestry of its sparks. The edge of night, of day--sunsets and sunrises." Abandoning his dreamy ramble, Stephan sighed once and turned away from the rising light. 

"Come now. Inside." He took Mulder's arm and drew him up the steps. 

"Could you survive a prolonged exposure?" Mulder asked as they entered his building.

"Oh, yes. People's reactions vary a great in severity, but usually run moderate to mild after the initial period of transformation. A day in the sun can be quite sick- making, but is rarely fatal in itself. Several days of exposure, combined with a scarcity of blood--that will kill more often than not."

"Why doesn't this come with a handbook?" Mulder groused complainingly as they ascended the elevator.

" The Vampire's Guide to Etiquette and Spots of Interest'?" Stephan rejoined smilingly. 

"Why not?"

Stephan's face edged out of its smile and his eyes gleamed darkly. "No doubt because oral tradition is a safer method for transmitting information. Soon enough you'll come to appreciate anything that safeguards your safety." 

Held by his gaze, Mulder swallowed. It was still difficult for him to accept what his body was telling him. Where his body had gone, his mind could not yet follow. It was too alien a place. As yet was merely skimming across the surface of understanding, borne by facile banter and a readiness to believe the unbelievable. But neither would take him much farther, he suspected. A glimmer of panic, sharp as sunlight, knifed his chest. 

Stephan glanced sharply at him. "Do not think about it," he said simply, guiding Mulder, whose steps fell into an awkward, automatic gait, from the elevator and down the hall toward his apartment. "The becoming doesn't happen overnight, whatever the stories may tell you. Four score years the average man walks the earth, and still does not know what it means to be human. Don't expect to know yourself--don't wait for some kind of instantaneous vampire enlightenment to arrive today or tomorrow--or ever--like a birthright or an insight. It does not happen like that."

A heavy melancholy dragged at Mulder--and it felt to his heart no different and no less dull than the dysthymic length of chain he'd been hauling around all his days. "Shit," he said with concise and banal crudity as he unlocked his door. 

"Yes, it is a shame," Stephan said abstractedly, his mind seemingly on another track. "But only the angels are formed in anything approaching perfection, free of waste and dross." He walked in behind Mulder and moved directly to close the blinds.

"Are we talking about the same thing?"

"Shit, wasn't it?" Stephan said. 

Mulder blinked. He was suddenly tired, down to the soles of his feet, and swayed slightly where he stood. 

Stephan came to him, considered his face gravely. "You did buy a coffin, didn't you?" 

Mulder's eyes snapped open with a renewed charge of panic. "Oh, god--"

And Stephan's face dissolved into a light map of laughter, and he cupped Mulder's jaw gently. "You are so endearingly easy to tease."

****

He was immersed in a dream: he was trapped in a box open to the stars that lay in the center of a lush garden, redolent of magnolias and bougainvillea but bedded with deeper, brackish odors that were carried to his nostrils from some near area of swamp. Chill breezes caressed his face, moonlight blued his skin, and Spanish moss and shadows cris-crossed together, blurring until he could not trust his eyesight to discern reality from its shade, while around him small blooded creatures jumped tantalizingly close, their heat and heartbeats as palpable to him as his own. He looked up with aching eyes, and tried to move his head to see something other than the hem of massive trees that swayed far above, and then it came to him that he was not alone, that on a balcony he could just glimpse from the edge of his eye Scully was typing something intently. She would not come to him, he realized with terror; she would not lay down her work and he would lie here not as long as the night lasted but for all time, as the days passed, as the nights passed like a series of boxcars, and then it occurred to him to wonder why he was next to a train station anyway. 

Mulder blinked grittily and worked his eyes open to find himself staring at an area of pleated darkness, something soft and near. It was, he saw as his vision cleared, the summit of Stephan's back, a broad sweep of shoulder folding into the juncture of neck, which in turn formed a graceful isthmus to the somehow detached curve of his skull. Mulder stared at the vampire's bare neck and tried not to feel the exquisite itch of his lengthening fangs, teasing now from his gums, or the gums themselves, which seemed to ache with a new sensitivity, but damn it, he could feel his teeth, as if those cool calcine thorns were suddenly fully nerved and alive. He ran his tongue over their points and as he did realized he was aroused. 

"Wake up," he muttered to Stephan, shoving at him. 

"Blerph," Stephan said to the pillow.

"I'm going to bite your fucking head off," Mulder whispered, then yanked the other over onto his back. Stephan emitted a small purring sound that struck Mulder as an utterly inappropriate acoustic for a sophisticated gentleman vampire to make. He began to nip at the other man's body, stroking it with his tongue then striking at it with his teeth, feeling like a snake putting the moves on. Stephan's encouragement issued as a series of sighs and chirrups that cohered little by little into a running commentary delivered in what sounded like gutter French of a dialect Mulder's limited high-school study had not prepared him to translate. 

"Does that mean you like this?" he said to Stephan's navel. 

"You are a prize," Stephan answered obliquely, in English now. He stroked the warm, fuzzed nape of Mulder's neck, looking over to the shaded bedroom windows, estimating late afternoon. Light chinked the blinds with violently bright blades of sun that made him squint instinctively with memories of burnt eyes. He pulled his gaze back to his companion as Mulder climbed astride him and settled on his hips, in which position he resembled all the more a mischievous imp. 

"Tell me things," Mulder said, rocking against him with teasing expertise. 

"Impale yourself, demon child, and I will reveal to you the secrets of the universe." Stephan smiled up at him, eyes slitted, one arm flung above his head. 

Mulder was on him in an instant, nudging and snubbing the entrance to his body against the tip of Stephan's lifted cock. When he could not fit himself in place, he reached over, refusing to surrender his position, and fumbled in the bedside table drawer for lubricant. "This should be easier," he seethed, and Stephan was saying something in return but Mulder's hands were at that moment slick with lube, stroking, pulling, and then he was sliding onto a thick, dull knife of pleasure that twisted eloquently through his guts. 

"Bliss--" Stephan breathed, eyes sliding shut. 

Despite his exploitative intentions, Mulder forgot to interrogate the vampire, and began instead posting rhythmically in place, in a cradle of flesh that rose to meet him as Stephan pushed up his legs and supported him with his thighs. His own thighs were trembling quickly and he was nearer the edge than he'd known; already his balls were lifting and curling into his body, and thrills of nerve-tightening intensity were striking upwards along his legs, arrowing inside him where he bedded the other man's throbbing length, and oh god, it felt so good, so good that for an unknown, dizzying time he forgot the other lust breaking like a fever in his fangs, and rode his lover hard and simply with human, rutting need, rocking, lifting, then bringing himself down ruthlessly onto a point of fire that struck sparks into the very heart of him. 

"Oh god!" Mulder cried out harshly. One hand blindly sought Stephan's and latched there as he took himself in his other hand and began jerking his cock roughly, which brought an ecstasy so brilliantly forceful that he could have wept. "Fuck--yes-- god, yes!"

Stephan arched up off the bed with nearly violent urgency and gasped as he was drawn into a ripping, inexorable climax, then collapsed bonelessly into the bedding again with a full-throated groan. He felt Mulder slump, replete, back against his thighs, then the younger man tumbled with uncertain volition to one side and draped himself over Stephan's lust-dampened body.

"I was going to quiz you," Mulder managed to say after a minute, pressing the warm arc of his brow into the space below Stephan's jaw. He felt the slow retraction of his fangs and made a new, more visceral connection between desire and hunger than he had yet done before. "Does it often happen that--" He hesitated, searching for words, and before he could finish the other did so for him.

"That you feel both lusts at once--? Yes. But it is an irreproachable dictate of your body. Don't fault yourself."

"I wasn't," Mulder said, propping himself up on one arm and giving Stephan a look the other man was beginning to recognize, a clear-eyed, expressionless study whose focus--internal or external--it was impossible to isolate.

Stephan was silent a moment, returning Mulder's study. "I thought you might embrace guilt over your condition, its exigencies. For a time, at least." 

"Oh, I'm sure," Mulder said coolly. He'd suspected from the first that the other vampire hadn't wrung his hands raw worrying about the degree of Mulder's enthusiasm for his conversion. "This isn't reversible, is it?"

"No." Stephan's tone was flat, final.

Mulder considered him for a limitless moment. "It didn't bother you at all, did it--that I didn't ask for this, that I might regret it."

Stephan, unexpectedly, smiled. "No one asks for this. Or rather, those who do aren't chosen. Eagerness to take the shroud indicates a certain taint of character. It's a sign of instability, and doesn't make for an advantageous showing even were applicants welcomed, which they rarely are."

"My entire life I've felt guilty," Mulder said quietly, staring with green, opaque eyes at Stephan. "Just for being alive." 

Stephan raised a brow very gently. "And now?"

"Well. . .at least I've never been a vegetarian," Mulder said. He was smiling--but just barely. "Besides, I don't have to kill, do I? Do I even have to drink human blood?"

"No. There are some--I'd go so far as to say many--who never do. They feed on animals, taking only what they need. Which is perhaps one good reason our kind is still extant. I mean, good Lord, if we went around mowing down the populace as the myths and motion pictures purported, we'd be discovered and very likely exterminated in short order." 

"Crosses--holy ground--running water--" Mulder began thinking aloud, making further lists of folkloric points.

"You probably know the answers to most of your own questions," Stephan said. "Symbols, idols, and icons hold little inherent threat--it's the people who wield them one has to worry about; religious zealots are dangerous because they are zealots, not because they wear a gold cross at their neck. Holy ground--such as it is--is no guard against us, except perhaps aesthetically. Personally, I find the prospect of taking my dinner in a church unappetizing, but tastes differ. Some get off on it. One in every crowd, as they say. Running water--that would make life difficult, wouldn't it?" Stephan snorted mildly. 

"Shape-shifting," Mulder said, somewhat hopefully.

"We've discussed this," Stephan returned with a arid, quelling look. 

Mulder pursed his lips in renewed disappointment. "So, midnight flits across the rooftops are out. . .invisibility?" He brightened.

"After a fashion. It's a exercise of will, not a refraction of light, after all. You're manipulating minds, not slipping sideways into the ether, as one of my pupils used to say."

Mulder's eyes glowed as his mind raced exuberantly ahead, planning dozens of raids on the military-industrial complex. Now this would be fun. 

Stephan accurately read the thoughts tumbling in his creation's tousled head and a wickedly satisfied smile returned to the edges of his lips. The boy was a charming, opportunistic, eager young whippet, and Stephan had indeed made the right choice in bringing him over. With every passing moment his doubts dissipated further. So far, Mulder asked only the obvious questions, but adjustment was a process, and it was always for the best if a new child unflowered slowly into his becoming. 

**** 

He must have slept for when he woke again it was fully dark, and his room was a mass of shadows upon shadows. Something bothered him about the sight before him that after a minute coalesced into the thought: *I can see too well.* He could see the details of the room even now, where once such darkness would have been no more than a picture sketched in charcoal on black paper. Enhanced vision seemingly drew more light from the substance of things--the dresser, the walls, the boxed shapes of television and bookcase. 

Alert even as his eyes opened, after assessing the room in this new and intriguing fashion Mulder sat up and tossed off the sheet covering his naked body. He flicked on the bedside lamp more from habit than need, then sat a moment on the edge of his bed and tried his new senses on for size. Empty apartment, but a floor full of life, the thick stew of his neighbors at their nightly pastimes, talking, laughing, eating. A cat walking along the edge of the building, several stories down. Light tap of the kitchen faucet dripping. He could feel it all, sense it all, and though the impressions at first broke upon him as sounds, they were also something more, vibrations of a different understanding. Just acknowledging this made Mulder feel faintly nauseous.

He stood and went into the bathroom, where he looked at himself in the mirror. His own familiar face frowned back at him, smudged with sleep and an edgy kind of awe at what he'd become. Touching his hair, pressing his fingers to his jaw and cheeks, he studied himself and wondered what the hell to do with his life from this point on. The stubble on his jaw had grown rougher as he slept; thus did another myth bite the dust. Eyes glittered, pupils like hematite, irises breathing green and grey in turn, and at their lower arc the orbital ridges appeared newly defined, like dusky feathered wings in their matching sweep. Pale, his face gleamed in the bright bathroom light, and it struck him that he looked mad or drugged, but he was neither, he was lucidly himself, a vampire. 

Call Scully, one part of his mind cried to him. She would know how to fix this; surely she could find a way. Scully, who held the magical relief of science at her fingertips, an array of pills and scalpels and machinery that would deliver him from. . .from this. But his reflection held him in place, mask, magnet, and even while his mind thrashed anxiously in its web, his face considered itself with cool fascination. He was a portrait in oil, and the colors were subtly different than the original. Was he himself anymore? 

He heard Scully before she even reached his apartment door--felt her arrive on his floor, emerge from the elevator, nearing. Almost, he went to greet her naked, but caught himself halfway there, feeling foolish as he did. He pulled on a robe and went to the door, to open it just as his visitor was raising her hand to knock. 

"Oh. . .hello." Scully held a bag in the crook of her arm and gave him her full professional scrutiny as they briefly stood there in the doorway. Mulder's appearance was quite passable for a man superficially dead, she had to admit. Though pale, robed, and crowned with the slightly wonky hair of a man recently asleep, he impressed her as fully awake; his alert expression was actually almost disturbing, but she was used to seeing that blank face, that striking intensity, and so she dismissed her momentary unease.

Mulder stood back to let her enter and sniffed as she did. Scully blinked and glanced his way, then quickly pulled back her gaze.

"You've brought me orange juice, apple juice and--grapefruit? What, no tomato? Saltines. Sunflower seeds. Something in a can. . .soup, probably."

Swallowing down her first response, Scully moved through to the kitchen, where she flicked on the light and set down the grocery bag. "Okay. ..you want to tell me how you knew that?"

Mulder, entering the kitchen after her, shrugged once and gave a tiny sideways pull of his lips that passed for a smile. 

When he didn't answer, Scully began taking things from the bag. "Are you hungry?" It was both question and subtle warning. 

"I'll try some of that juice." Mulder came near and took the bottle of orange juice, and as Scully watched with raised brow downed its contents with several long, nearly unbroken gulps. 

"I don't think that's B-positive," Scully said, leaning back against the counter and studying him. 

Mulder nodded slowly, abstractedly. He was testing his reactions. "I prefer Tropicana," he said after a minute, trying to decide if he was disappointed at not having spewed up his drink with dramatic fervor. 

"Sorry."

"I forgot to ask Stephan about eating," Mulder mused.

Scully stiffened like a warrior called to arms. "Is that the man you were with--you saw him again?"

"Yeah, he. . .turned up." Before Scully could bristle further, he held up a hand. "You don't have to say it, Scully." 

"Mulder, how could you let him go--you know we have to get him tested."

"I doubt he'd go easy. And I can't blame him." Now there was an irony, Mulder thought. He'd spent a good part of his career trying to draw the monsters out of their closets and into the light of investigative scrutiny, into the realm of law and science. Now the shoe was on the other foot, as it were, and he identified with the monster. Who was he kidding? He was the monster. 

"Mulder--I--" Scully's tongue snagged on her own stunned dismay. "I can't believe you just let him leave."

"I didn't exactly let him leave, Scully. I woke up and--" Mulder realized the import of his words even as they left his mouth, and felt his face prickle with heat. "And he was gone," Mulder finished weakly, clearing his throat. The look Scully gave him far outstripped the glaciation of any previous ice age. Only a blue-eyed woman could radiate that degree of chill, and she knew precisely the effect of her gaze, which in its deliberateness was all the more demoralizing.

Scully turned from him and seemed to be assessing various mundane objects in the kitchen in turn--her purse, the groceries, the dishrag--for their distraction value, as if hoping to find something that would absorb her anger. But when she spoke again, her voice was calm. "I can't force you to let me help you, Mulder. I'm not your mother."

Mulder winced. "I'm aware of this." 

"I'm not even your primary-care physician," Scully went on crisply. 

"Scully," Mulder said, his voice gentling. He approached her and put his hands on her shoulders. "I'm sorry." He held her gaze. "But look at me. *Look* at me." Blue eyes reflected his own with perfect clarity; Scully's face, set and intractable, tilted up like an ivory frame for that mirroring regard. 

"I'm looking, Mulder. But I don't see what you see. I never have."

Mulder searched her eyes, then shook his head, feeling helpless. If Scully's gaze was a mirror, it was ironically the first he'd met that didn't hold his image. She didn't see what he'd become, and probably never would, even if he grew wings and bit her neck and then dissolved into a wisp of fog she could fit into a flask and carry around in her purse. Strangely though, he was suddenly unsure whether he wanted her to see the truth. 

"I ran some more tests," Scully said, breaking their strained rapport, drawing carefully away. 

Abruptly tired and impatient, Mulder picked up the sunflower seeds she'd brought and wandered out into the living room, where, after a moment, Scully joined him. "And?" he said briefly, dropping onto the couch.

"Well. . ." Scully took a deep breath and appeared to be marshaling her thoughts. "You're not anemic or iron-deficient, which might have helped explain any cravings you're having for blood, or for its components--heme, to put it simply. I checked for any abnormalities in your hemoglobin, myoglobin, and cytochromes--which are enzymes that assist in energy production." She paused. 

"And?" Mulder prompted again.

"There were abnormalities. But I'm not exactly sure how to categorize them; if they're the result of some virus or bacteria, it's the most generous byproduct of disease I've ever come across. Certainly not indicative of ill health on the face of it. The counts were so high I have no real basis for comparison--higher, actually, than any recorded levels I've seen--higher than those of Olympic-class athletes, by a factor of ten. I also tested your blood lactate levels, which are extraordinarily low, and for evidence of a change in erythropoietin production, which is inversely elevated. Frankly, your cardiovascular system is in remarkable shape, given that you seem to be missing a pulse."

Mulder smiled wanly. 

"Your saliva sample was interesting." Scully's voice grew self-consciously dryer on the last word. "Somehow you're--" She paused again, making the small face she wore when forced to deliver a finding contradictory to rationality. "You're secreting a salivary plasminogen activator similar to that found in vampire bats." Her gaze forbade him to comment. "It's what's known as a fibrinolytic agent, with a specificity of affect that prevents clotting at the surface of a wound rather than the blood or system as a whole. But there's something else there, too, that I haven't fully identified yet. It looks like a fibroblastic agent, a morphogenic protein designed to accelerate the healing of wounds. I've never seen anything like it that wasn't a synthetically designed drug." 

Scully fell silent again for a few moments, obviously choosing her words carefully. "Mulder. I don't want to alarm you, and I have no way yet of being sure, but if I had to judge on current evidence whether this particular agent were a natural or man-made substance, I'd start looking for the lab that was producing it."

Mulder blinked. "What was the evidence again?"

"That this substance bears a greater similarity to the synthetic products of recombinant-DNA technologies than to anything found in nature."

"That you know of."

Scully lowered her head a few degrees and stared at the clasp of her hands. 

"Besides, you didn't say it's unparalleled in nature."

"It's not natural, Mulder," Scully said flatly, looking up at him again. "I've never heard of any disease that increases the effectiveness and health of the host body and gifts it with accelerated recuperative powers."

"Then maybe it's not a disease," Mulder said quietly. 

"Tests confirm that this is a form of retrovirus, engineered to transport genetic material into your cells and mutate them to produce specific physical reactions and possibly behaviors."

"Then it is a disease," Mulder said, beginning to feel a burn of anger. "You have no proof that this isn't a product of nature."

Talk about role-reversal, Scully thought dispiritedly, looking at her partner. "Why are you afraid to believe, Mulder? I can't think of a single case where given this evidence you wouldn't have jumped to propose a theory of government culpability and conspiracy."

"I--" Mulder began to speak, then broke off to draw a deep breath Stephan's remark about vampires ending up in government labs rung in his mind. He looked away; looked back more calmly. "I won't rule it out, but I think it's unlikely. We're talking about something that's been around hundreds, if not thousands of years. And I've no reason not to believe Stephan--"

"Stephan," Scully broke, articulating the word with dry faint derision as if just hearing it for the first time.

"Yeah, okay, it's a cheesy name, but he's real, and he didn't just hatch from a lab yesterday--he's over two hundred years old." Mulder's eyes narrowed as Scully made that face he'd come to recognize as a poorly disguised smirk. "Fine. It doesn't matter if you don't believe. I know what I am, Scully."

Scully's throat tightened. This was not the way she'd meant things to play out, but then nothing went according to plan when it came to Mulder. "What are you going to do, then?" She kept her voice low and steady, as rational as she could make it. "Sleep days and fly by night? I'm sorry," she added, seeing the exasperated look on Mulder's face. "That just, um, slipped out." She checked herself, sighed. "The bureau doesn't have a night shift for investigative agents--though you might find yourself Mr Popularity at the annual blood drive." 

Mulder gave her an even dirtier look, combined with a sour compression of lips. "I'm used to *other* people mocking me," he said. 

Immediately, Scully felt guilty, no doubt as he'd intended, but rather than apologizing again for her untimely whimsy she just nodded. "But seriously. What are you going to do?"

"I don't know." Mulder leaned forward and rested his elbows on his knees, pressing his forehead gently to his hands, then half-consciously drew his knees together and adjusted the drape of his plaid robe in an odd but instinctive gesture of modesty. Restlessly he changed the position of his arms, and then again. "He said sunlight wasn't necessarily fatal in itself," Mulder said at last. 

Scully pursed her lips. "Mm. Well, that's good to know."

"I could probably continue to work. . .maybe." With weird clarity a vision flitted into Mulder's head: himself ambling into the office, hand gripped around a bag lunch containing a little plasma pack not unlike a juice box. He grimaced to himself. "Or maybe not."

"I don't think you should try to work or expose yourself to sunlight until we know how serious this photodermatitis is. Though frankly I'm more worried about your heart at the moment. I've been monitoring your readings all day--something's not right. Your pulse rate is too regular. If I didn't know better--" She broke off, her clear eyes catching some shadowy, distressed sign from his own. "Let me see your monitor."

Mulder pulled his gaze, which had slid off surreptitiously, back to hers. He drew in a breath, then released it explosively. "Don't hit me, Scully," he said, rising. 

She watched him move to the kitchen, then return holding his monitor. He offered it to her, then, when she didn't take it, placed it on the coffee table. It lay there, forming a small wet pool on the polished wooden surface.

"I put it in the sink with the tap dripping," he said finally. "I didn't know if it would work. I--Scully, wait--"

Scully had risen and walked now around the armchair to avoid the imploring lift of Mulder's robed arm. Determined to get her purse from the kitchen, blinkered to anything but her path, she found herself easily blocked by her partner's lanky form as she reached the doorway. 

"I'm sorry, Scully," Mulder said in a voice suddenly bereft of ease and finesse. "I was going to keep it on, but Stephan--I was afraid--" He swallowed. "I didn't want you calling and freaking out if it suddenly, um, accelerated. . .Scully. . ."

"This is not irresponsible, Mulder. This is. . .this goes beyond that. If something had happened to you, I--" She broke off, too angry and hurt to continue, breathless with an icy, crisp feeling--rage--that was almost boundless. 

"Scully, I know. I know." Mulder held her shoulders and then stroked her neck, her hair, went so far as to cup her cheek.

Looking up into her partner's open face, accepting that touch, Scully felt her eyes tear up with the stupid brim of heartache, reasonless and blinding. She loved him. She hated him. Loved and hated his obsessiveness. Loved and hated his methodical lunacy. Loved and hated his body, his assumptions, his touch. A man who forced himself to walk with stoic grace on the balanced edge of a razor, who deliberately chose everything that was painful and difficult in life over everything easeful and easy--loving such a man was brutal and not what she'd hoped for herself.

And now it was clear that her partner had slipped off the path that had long held him steady, thin and cutting though it had been. He was, in truth as clear as Scully had ever seen it, crazy. Delusional, certifiable, resolutely in denial of his madness. And it terrified her. 

Mulder was soothing her, but had not offered another, redundant apology for his behavior. Scully stood, forehead pressed to his chest, feeling the oddly reassuring weight and dig of his chin on her scalp. She was utterly at a loss for what to do. Committal. What else. Once in the hospital for whatever illness he'd contracted or been given, he would be under observation by professionals who would, sooner or later, require a psych evaluation. Which he would not pass, could not pass. . .could he? He was smart and knew the tests, Scully thought. And yet. . .

When she felt Mulder stiffen in her arms she did not intuit the reason. How could she have? When he drew away and stared at her, hurt in his eyes, his face stricken at her betrayal, even her own guilt did not provide the comprehension that he'd sifted and read the thoughts churning in her skull. Her mind was her own, inviolate, and its private cell had never been breached. When he spoke he shattered her.

"Is that what you want for me? A padded cell and a straitjacket? A nice needle prick when I get out of line? God damn it, Scully--how, *how* can you be so clear-eyed and so blind?"

She stepped back, breaking free of his grip, but could not break free of his eyes. He was all fire, as if his body were the channel for a heat trapped and vented from the earth's very core. Seeing him like this only seemed to confirm her fears and it took a moment for her mind to react to the actual shock it had received.

"Mulder, did you just--did you just read my mind?" As the words blurted from her mouth Scully felt as crazy as Mulder for asking the question. 

"Well, what do you think?" Mulder's voice was cutting, cruel. "Damn lucky I can, isn't it, Doctor Scully?" 

*That's not possible,* Scully's mind said. But though her mind still balked at belief, the lifted hairs on her nape and the tingling fear in her body attested otherwise. Mulder stood before her, suddenly charged with an alien vitality that was new to Scully's eyes. Even in the ordinary drape of a plaid bathrobe which would have rendered another man innocuous and unthreatening, Mulder projected an aura of danger, something feral, raw, and almost menacing. The frayed robe did not hide the elegant architecture of his body. Slim and tall, he stood like a pale statue in the dusk, backlit by the kitchen light but painted with the living room's thick shadows. 

Scully couldn't see his face anymore, not really. In just a few ticks of her watch it had changed and darkened, and receded like the moon behind a cloak of clouds. And that was how he appeared in her mind's eye after she had taken her purse and gone; unmoving and watchful, distant and impossible, from this point on, to know. 

Finis...?

When making your choice in life, do not neglect to live. --Samuel Johnson


End file.
